There Is No GOP Alternative Health Care

But internal divisions, disagreement about political tactics, and Obama's 2012 reelection add up to uncertainty on whether Republicans will vote on a plan of their own before the 2014 elections, or if not by then, perhaps before the president leaves office, more than six years after the original promise. Sixteen months before those elections, some Republicans cite no need to offer an alternative. ''I don't think it's a matter of what we put on the floor right now,'' said Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, who heads the party's campaign committee. He added that what is important is ''trying to delay Obamacare.'' Michigan congressman Fred Upton, who leads a committee with jurisdiction on health care, said, ''If we are successful in ultimately repealing this legislation, then yes, we will have a replacement bill ready to come back with.''...Divisions were evident earlier this year, when a bill to make it easier for high-risk individuals to buy coverage died without a vote. It was sidetracked after conservatives, many of them elected with Tea Party support, objected to any attempt to improve the current law rather than scuttle it. With the rank and file growing more conservative, some Republicans admit that without changes, they likely could not pass the alternative measure they backed when Democrats won approval for Obama's bill in 2010.

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In the beginning, the resistance to health-care reform was based on the argument that the United States had the best health-care system in the world, and why were we mucking around with it, anyway? Then, of course, it became apparent that a) most Americans hated their health-insurance companies with the heat of a thousand suns, and b) that the rest of the industrialized world was laughing uproariously at our pretensions, and at our many unnecessarily dead people. It was only then, and with the arrival of an actual reform bill in Congress, that we started hearing about tyranny, and jackboots, and death panels, and all the other bogeymen that were allowed to drive the debate and help visit upon us the worst Congress in the country's history. Hence, the problem with the original Republican alternative from before the 2010 midterms brought upon the country the flock of loons that forced Speaker John Boehner admirably to sum up the new role of the Congress:

In an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation'' on Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner said Congress ''ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal,'' not by how many new laws it creates.

The object of legislatures is not to legislate -- or, more accurately and to borrow a useful phrase from the church of my birth, to be anti-legislators. And, of course, the problem is that the president refuses to "lead" on the issues.